Veeam v9 Direct NFS Access and Tegile IntelliFlash Arrays

Posted on May 10, 2016 by Amrutha Naik | Technical Marketing Manager

They say don’t put all your eggs in one basket. But what are you to do when you get all the goodness from a single basket?

Such is our story, read on: Tegile is the only storage company in the market that has truly unified multi-protocol arrays. No additional boxes, licenses, modules are required – Tegile provides both SAN and NAS support in one array, period.

Other than providing the benefit of being spoiled for choices, Tegile’s integration with backup products, such as Veeam, has become much stronger with the release of Veeam v9. With Veeam v9, a cool new feature called “Direct NFS” access has been introduced.

Before Veeam v9, if an NFS datastore had to be accessed for backup and recovery, the only way to do it was by using either the “Virtual Appliance (Hot add)” or “Network” transport mode; and the drawback with both of those methods is that the data had to pass through the hypervisor stack and thereby place all the load on the production environment. In this method, the production environment faces all the brunt of the backup, with a major chunk of its CPU and memory used for backup purposes.

Before Veeam v9 Direct NFS AccessBelow is an example of how data gets backed up in “Network” mode

The backup proxy sends a request to the ESX(i) host to locate the necessary VM on the datastore.

The ESX(i) host locates the VM on the datastore.

VM data blocks are copied from production and sent to the backup proxy over LAN.

The backup proxy sends the data to target.

Let’s allow the production environment to do its actual work and offload the heavy lifting to our arrays, shall we?

“Instead of putting all the load on the Production environment, with Tegile’s integration with Veeam v9 Direct NFS access, the backup process can now be completely offloaded to the Tegile Intelliflash array.”

This is where Tegile joins hands with Veeam’s latest addition to its product suite, Direct NFS access. Instead of putting all the load on the production environment, with Tegile’s integration, the backup process can now be completely offloaded to the Tegile IntelliFlash array.

“Instead of putting all the load on the Production environment, with Tegile’s integration with Veeam v9 Direct NFS access, the backup process can now be completely offloaded to the Tegile Intelliflash array.”

“Direct SAN access” has been a popular transport mode used by customers to access VMs residing on VMFS datastores housed on Block storage. With the introduction of “Direct NFS access,” this support is now extended to access VMs residing on NFS datastores housed on NAS storage arrays.

Tegile, the only storage vendor in the market who supports both SAN and NAS protocols, has you covered from both sides (all in one basket).

After Veeam v9 Direct NFS AccessHow does it work with “Direct NFS” access Transport mode?

The backup proxy sends a request to the ESXi host to locate a VM on the NFS datastore.

The ESX(i) host locates the VM.

The ESX(i) retrieves metadata about the layout of VM disks on the Tegile array.

The ESX(i) host sends the metadata to the backup proxy.

The backup proxy uses this metadata to copy VM data blocks directly from the NFS datastore housed on the Tegile IntelliFlash array without putting any load on the production setup.

The backup proxy processes the copied data blocks/VMs to the backup repository, in this case a LUN/share residing on a Tegile array.

Talk about being spoiled for choices! Tegile offers both hybrid and all-flash arrays. Tegile’s all-flash arrays can be used on the production environment to house VMs (SAN/NAS) to leverage the best performance that these arrays have to offer. The hybrid arrays can then be used as backup repositories with the protocol of your choice. To learn more about Veeam and Tegile’s high availability for the modern datacenter, see this video.

Wait, there’s more!

You may already know that Veeam provides the ability to dedupe backup data, but the deduplication happens within a backup job. With Tegile’s integration with Veeam v9, you can also leverage our inline deduplication feature that can dedupe data between multiple backup jobs.

Above is a customer screenshot, whose 56.5TB data was compressed and deduped to only 7.4TB using Tegile as its backup target. This happy Tegile customer enjoys a whopping 87% in data savings!

Another happy customer, Mizuno USA overcame challenges with data growth, replication, backup and disaster recovery, using Tegile IntelliFlash arrays. In fact, a Veeam job that had been running for 4 days at 40% complete was moved to Tegile and finished in 4 hours.

Just by moving dedupe from the backup server to the array, Mizuno’s datacenter completed a workload in hours instead of days. Need I say more?

The Best of Both SAN and NAS Worlds

At Tegile, we offer a world of choice for storage in the corporate data center. Not only do we offer hybrid and all-flash arrays, we support both SAN & NAS protocols, in-line deduplication and compression and now with the introduction of Veeam v9 Direct NFS access, the backup load can be offloaded to the Tegile array for VMs running on your NFS virtualized environment. To get a glimpse of the Tegile interface, check out this quick demo.

We think Tegile storage integration with Veeam v9 Direct NFS access, along with the already popular Direct SAN access mode, offers people the best of both SAN and NAS worlds — don’t you agree?